Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the coming transformation of higher education

So I’ve been back in NYC a few days now and trying to describe to people why I was so psyched about being a part of the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, and what I think is important about it for others.

[This is both a fun conversational gambit as well as part of my professional duties re: documenting the festival. The hope is to transform the notes and raw materials found here into something as sleek, visual and inviting as these].

So here’s what I got so far:

The magic was in combining 1) educators and 2) technologists who are both committed to 3) innovation in 4) the noncommercial space;

And throwing them together not just to form relationships and build community, but with the expectation that they actually Make stuff (which generally speaking is the best way to form relationships, to build communities, and to learn)

And a specific type of multiculturalism emerged: you have the thoughtfulness, reflectiveness and social engagement of the education people,

combined with the can-do, results-oriented, rapid-prototype, touchable-sketch skillz of the tech people.

And together they Make stuff using technology, specifically, which is one of the most powerful forces shaping and driving social change, but is often perceived by non-technologists as being obscure or malign because it is 1)complex and hard to understand and 2) controlled by Others (those with expertise, corporations, and/or government)

Which helps establish one of the key elements that Mozilla Foundation, as I understand it, is out to establish, which is that the WEB is something WEBuild. (We= Everybody, you, me, not some faceless Others). That’s why you need an open “free” noncommercial web so that it belongs to you and me. And that’s why you need people in general with the skills (and resources, of course) to build it. Because those who control the design of the Web increasingly control other elements of society and our experience.

Which is, in turn, a major task for those in the Learning space to take on: WEB building skills (or WebCraft) constitute a new form of literacy that is lacked by far more people than good old Reading and Writing. I am a Webcraft illiterate myself.

So basically: to spread Webcraft literacy, to learn by making stuff together, to keep the web free by making it ourselves, to shape society through more democratic design, to figure out best ways and practices to learn and make in groups of people who bring different skills to the table, and to think critically about–and tell joyful stories about–all this doing and building and learning and making and sharing, the better to get more people to notice and get involved.

I am doing a bit of handwaving here but this is my first draft sketch–let me know what you think!